Alice's very weird wonderland: Why a behind-the-scenes row might see
Tim Burton's most fantastical film yet disappear from cinemas as fast
as the Cheshire Cat

The word is that watching Tim
Burton's Alice In Wonderland is the closest you can come to falling down
the rabbit hole yourself and into Lewis Carroll's fantasy world.

Those who have seen the film, or clips of it,
say that it is utterly breathtaking, a hallucinatory alternate universe
completely realised in every detail, from the sun streaming in through
the gills of the mushrooms to the light falling on the individual fuzzy
hairs on the caterpillar's back.

It cost £158million to make and, with computer graphics mixed
with live action and animation, it is more technically ambitious than
anything Burton has done before. And it is in 3-D, putting it
head-to-head with the sci-fi phenomenon that is Avatar.

Scroll down
to watch the trailer...

Fantasy: Alice In
Wonderland is said to be Burton's most beautiful and most perfectly
imagined world yet

But far
more significantly, it is said to be simply Burton's most beautiful and
most perfectly imagined fantasy world.

The casting also has critical expectations
rising. Who else but Matt Lucas could play the twin grotesques of
Tweedledum and Tweedledee? And Johnny Depp, with green fluorescent
contact lenses, rouged cheeks and a frizzy orange wig, makes the most
extraordinary Mad Hatter.

With
typical attention to detail, Burton has enhanced Depp's eyes with
camera trickery, making them 15 per cent larger; so it's still Johnny
Depp, but Through The Looking-Glass.

Oscar-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood
has created a look for Depp which sees his clothes change colour as his
moods come and go. He is like a human mood ring, hung with ribbons and
hatpins and thimbles which dangle from his fingertips.

The Cheshire Cat, who can appear and
disappear at will and has what
Burton calls a creepy quality, is voiced by Stephen Fry and taps into
Burton's hatred of cats.

Michael
Sheen voices the White Rabbit,
Alan Rickman is the caterpillar and Barbara Windsor the dormouse,
Christopher Lee surfaces as the monstrous Jabberwock, Timothy Spall is
a lugubrious bloodhound, Frances de la Tour is Alice's Aunt Imogene,
Michael Gough the Dodo and Paul Whitehouse the March Hare.

Forget special
effects, as one of the few live action characters, Mia Wasikowska - who
plays Alice in Tim Burton's new movie - had to stand on a box to appear
taller

Tim Burton says the
Red Queen - played by wife Helena Bonham Carter - reminds him of the
infamous New York property millionaire Leona Hemsley, known as the
'queen of mean', who, ironically, was a hatter's daughter

Burton's
partner, Helena Bonham Carter, plays the Queen of Hearts as the acme of
royal rage, with a plucked hairline, red wig, geisha-white face and
uncontrollable 'Off with her head!' aggression.

On screen, her head has been enlarged to three
times its size and the end result is quite grotesque. 'I can't rely on
Tim to make me pretty,' sighs Helena.

Alice In Wonderland - created in the 1860s
by Charles Dodgson, a
mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, under the pseudonym
Lewis Carroll - is surely the literary masterpiece which Burton was
born to interpret.

He
has even worked in the studio once
used by the English illustrator Arthur Rackham, whose illustrations for
the 1907 edition ' produced the most iconic pictures of Alice that
anyone has ever seen'.

'I
read the Alice stories when I was
eight, and I've seen the various TV and cinema versions, including the
1951 Disney cartoon. But, to be honest, I've never liked any of them,'
Burton says.

'There was
always a silly girl wandering around
from one crazy character to another, and I never felt a real emotional
connection to that, so it was an attempt to try and give it some
framework and emotional grounding that I felt I hadn't seen in any
version before.

White Queen: Anne
Hathaway says: 'I wanted her to have the punk spirit of Debbie Harry,
the etherealness of American artists Dan Flavin and the grace of Greta
Garbo.' The Mad Hatter: Before filming, Johnny Depp painted pictures of
his character, which later proved almost identical to Tim Burton's
vision

'I think all of those
characters serve to indicate some type of mental weirdness that
everybody goes through.'

Burton
says
he wanted an Alice 'with gravity' rather than the usual little
girl skipping through the grass in her white socks and a blue pinafore
dress.

Eventually, he
settled on Mia Wasikowska, a young
Australian actress. 'She had that emotional toughness; standing her
ground in a way which makes her kind of an older person but with a
younger person's mentality,' the director says.

Having
previously portrayed the equally weird and wonderful Edward
Scissorhands and Willy Wonka for Burton, Johnny Depp was a shoo-in for
the Mad Hatter.

'I read the Lewis Carroll stories over and over again, and I
learned everything I could about Victorian times,' Depp says.

'It would have been too easy, and not very
believable, to have played the Mad Hatter as just a straightforward
crazy guy.

New chapter: Tim
Burton says he isn't trying to tell the old story in the film which will
'infuriate the purists'

'But I
knew Tim would be wanting more than that - there had to be
a reason why he was like that, because something had tipped him over
the edge.'

Depp's research
revealed
that the term 'mad as a hatter' came from a truth - that hatters in
Victorian times suffered from mercury poisoning, a side-effect of the
hat- manufacturing process which would affect the mind.

'The mercury would have also shown through his skin and his
hair, so the Hatter would have looked as mad as he behaved.'

For
screenwriter Linda Woolverton (The Lion King, Beauty And The Beast),
the positive early reaction has been a vindication of her vision.

'I
wasn't trying to re-tell the old story; I was toying with the thought:
what if Alice was older and she went back into Wonderland?

Alice In Wonderland
- created in the 1860s by Charles Dodgson, a
mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, under the pseudonym
Lewis Carroll - is surely the literary masterpiece Burton was
born to interpret

Double-trouble:
Matt Lucas plays the twin grotesques of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Tim
Burton's inspiration for them came from the creepy twins in the Stanley
Kubrick horror film The Shining

'I had this
mental picture of her standing at a very crucial moment in her life and
having to make an important decision, but being distracted by the White
Rabbit.'

In the film,
Alice's turning point comes as she receives an unexpected and unwelcome
very public marriage proposal in a Victorian garden.

Seeing the White Rabbit - with his
trademark waistcoat and watch, of course - she runs after him,
stumbles and falls down a hole into Wonderland, which is in decline,
overgrown and rather haunted.

She is taken to the hookah-smoking caterpillar, who tells her
that according to ancient prophecy, she has returned to slay the Red
Queen's dreaded Jabberwock and bring about the end of her reign.

'There's a lot that Lewis Carroll didn't
write, but I've based other scenes on things he did', Woolverton says.

'It will infuriate the purists, but this was
never meant to be a remake. This is Alice as a young woman.'

Breathtaking: The film
shows Alice as a young woman. And, right, the Red Queen's head has been
enlarged to three times the size. 'I can't rely on Tim to make me look
pretty,' actress Helena says

But despite all this nurturing of Burton's vision, his movie is
under threat of being smothered at birth. Quite extraordinarily, the
UK's three largest cinema chains - Odeon, Vue and Cineworld - are
threatening not to show it.

They account for 65 per cent of the UK's cinemas, and 90 per
cent of the 3-D screens, so the threat is a serious one.

Given that the premiere is next Thursday and
the movie opens on March 5, it's a disaster.

The cause of the angst is that
Disney wants to release the film on DVD and Blu-ray only three months
after it opens at the cinema, rather than the standard 17 weeks.

It wants to get the DVD into the shops
before the midsummer doldrums, and to capitalise on the marketing of the
movie while it is still fresh in people's minds.

But the cinemas are afraid that people will
just wait to buy the film on DVD rather than spend money on going to the
pictures. They aren't alone: four big cinema chains in Holland are
boycotting the film and the Italians are rebelling, too.

White Rabbit:
Animators visited a shelter for abandoned rabbits to observe their
characteristics

Disney, which
stands to lose upwards of £40million because of this row, says that 97
per cent of box office takings happen within eight weeks, and argues
that it is only asking for this flexibility in the case of perhaps two
movies a year.

Last week
the company sent two executives from Hollywood to try to find a
solution.

Burton himself
transferred filming from Cornwall, where a lot of exterior scenes were
shot, to Los Angeles, where the technology would be brought into play.
Scenes were filmed in front of all-green backgrounds which were then
overlaid digitally.

'The
novelty of the green wears off very quickly,' Depp complained during
filming. 'It's exhausting actually - we can't see what we are doing.'

Burton had lavender lenses fitted into his
glasses to counter-balance the colour. This way of working brought the
director great freedoms, particularly when it came to playing with
scale.

Glover's Knave Of
Hearts is half real, half digital. In the film he is 71/2ft tall, so on
set Glover wore a green suit and a pair of green stilts. For the final
film, his entire body, costume and cape were computer-generated - only
his face was real.

The Cheshire cat,
which can appear and disappear at will, is voiced by Stephen Fry

Special effects:
£158million was spent making the new Alice In Wonderland film

Depp is lost in admiration for Burton. He
says: 'He couldn't have bitten off anything bigger to chew. This is
almost lunatic time. To choose to grab Alice In Wonderland, that in
itself is one thing, and then to do it to the Tim Burton level is
madness.'

Burton, stuck
between a rock and a hard place over the distribution row, is keeping
his own counsel. But there is no doubt he will be deeply disappointed if
the film over which he has taken such care is available to only a
fraction of its potential audience.

As he says: 'When Lewis Carroll wrote his
Alice stories nearly 150 years ago, he was taking a big chance that
people would understand and appreciate that he was trying to do
something unusual.

'Now,
it's our turn to take our own chances - and I don't think we've let
him down.'

• Alice In
Wonderland has its charity premiere in London next Thursday and is
released on March 5.

Carroll's vision: Mia Wasikowska as Alice and
Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter

I love Tim Burton's movies and can't WAIT to see this, especially in 3D. I hope the row over it being shown is sorted out quickly. Nice cast list too. I like how neither Johnny Depp or Helena Bonham-Carter have ever been miscast in the 18 million roles Burton's thrown their way.

I meant to post about this well before now. I was quite disappointed with it - the 3D wasn't all that (I hear the effects were added after the movie was made and I could see the difference between AIW and Avatar). Helena Bonham-Carter looked brilliant as the Red Queen but I wasn't so keen on her delivery.

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